“Things come out of Things”

November 20th, 2014

As a collage artist, Robert Seydel forages, borrows, and transforms existing materials using a kind of “combinatorial magic.” A Picture Is Always a Book: Further Writings from Book of Ruth is woven from the fabrics of our world—as Seydel writes, “my art is a damaged thing, / of damaged things made.” This constellation of works by Seydel as well as other siglio artists reflects the synergy that occurs when things are collected, arranged, and manipulated to compose something new.

The who, why, when, whence, whereto, and how, likewise in the ImagiNation become whore, whist, whiff, whelp, whippoorwill, and whole. But not for scrutiny or mutiny nor for Porifera only, but for Porphyry perhaps.

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Contamination striates the work, as a kind of lovely virus. Traces of the linguistic adhere to the picture, pollute, in fact, both the pictures of themselves in their procedures and our cognition of them. That contamination—a kind of hybridization, unmoors the picture. It is loosed and set adrift in a field of linguistic-visual codes that refuse semantic and other closures and that are only partially visible in the work itself. Traces of another field of being and mentality slip through the work, and accord it a type of secondary atmosphere. It feels, in some way hard to countenance, less of work of art, though of course it is that too, than an artifact of the imagination in communion with its own expansions and possibilities.